Main navigation

Getting All I Asked For – Lots of Traveling

“Be careful what you wish for.”

I was very specific when starting Lift9 (which has since become Intrepid Consultants) that I wanted a business that was global. I had a lust to travel again as I had done during most of the 90s when helping to build ARIS to its IPO in 1997.

Last month I was in London for three weeks, returned home to Seattle for just the past week, and am now on an airplane to Ho Chi Minh City for the coming week.

The good news is that our company is doing so well that such travel is necessary. It’s exciting to see a plan come together. It was about a year ago that I initially came to Vietnam with the idea of starting a social media research center in Ho Chi Minh City. Now, I’m visiting again because the group has been so successful that we’re moving the research center to a better and bigger facility.

Our vision was always to make sure that our global offices, including the one in Ho Chi Minh, were going to be integrated into one core culture. In other words, we wanted to allow people in each office to all have equal opportunities to grow and contribute to Intrepid. After watching the “two-class” dysfunctional relationships that were built with many of the off-shoring efforts of the IT industry, we wanted to build something very different.

To that regard, when I return from this trip, one of our most promising rising stars, a researcher from the Ho Chi Minh, will be accompanying me back to Seattle, then to a trade show in Chicago. It wasn’t easy to get his visa for such a trip, but lots of people helped to make it possible. It will be his first trip to the US, and the Seattle office has some good events planned for his welcome.

So, while the jetlag and the long-stints in hotels can be tiring, when I see what we are building, and the relative success in such a short period of time, I’m still happy to be getting “what I had asked for.”

1Comment

[…] I flew about 150K miles last year. For most people this may seem like a lot of time in the air. Yet, I’m fairly certain most of the other executives at SDL logged even more miles. Such is the life of an executive of a global company. For the most part, I would not want it any other way. In fact, I started Lift9 specifically so that I could travel internationally as part of my job. […]